Abstract:

With the development of the multicore processor, developing threadlevel parallelism becomes a necessary means to improve the execution performance of the application programs. It makes transactional memory, which is a promising mechanism to support threadlevel parallelism, attract more and more attention. In this paper, firstly, we classify the transactional memory systems according to the conflict detection mechanism and the dataversioning mechanism. After that, we  summarize the main implementations of the transactional memory. Finally, we reexamine the transactional memory from the perspective of faulttolerance. We believe that the transactional memory has good characteristics of faulttolerance, and it can combine with some faulttolerant techniques naturally to achieve efficient fault isolation, fault detection and fault recovery.

Key words: transactional memory;fault tolerance;multicore processor